The present invention relates to a disk recording/reproducing apparatus for recording/reproducing information onto/from a disc-like optical recording medium (hereinafter, being called by an “optical disk”), such as, a CD or a DVD, etc., and in particular, it relates to a disk recording/reproducing apparatus and an alternation process method thereof, for enabling to shorten a time for alternation process due to defects or the like, and further, to achieve an improvement on deterioration of transfer rate when conducting the recording/reproducing.
An optical disk apparatus for recording/reproducing information, by applying the optical disk as a recording medium therein, is widely used to be an information recording apparatus within various kinds of electronic apparatuses, such as, a personal computer, for example. In particular, in recent years, various kinds of DVDs are spread or popularized widely, in addition to the conventional CDs. Also, a recording medium having further large memory capacity, such as, a BD is now on the way of commercialization thereof. Accompanying with that, a requirement is made for a disk recording/reproducing apparatus, which is compatible or deal with those various kinds of optical disks.
In particular, with the DVD and BD, for the purpose of keeping reliability with respect to disk defects when recording information thereon, as well as, an increase of an amount of recording information of the medium, a so-called “verify process” is conducted thereon, i.e., examining the sameness between the data read out by a predetermined block unit and that of the origin thereof, successively, while recording the user data thereon. And, if determining that they are not same or identical to each other, that block is recognized to be the defect block, and it is necessary to conduct a process, being so-called an alternation process (or, substitution), i.e., recording that data recorded into a region or an area (i.e., an alternation area) other than the user area for recording the user data therein on the optical disk. For example, in the following Patent Document 1 is described a technology of dividing the disc-like information recording medium into plural numbers of zones, each of which includes plural tracks therein, into a radial direction of rotation thereof, so as to provide an alternation area and an alternation management area for managing the said alternation areas, for each of the zones, thereby conducting the recording or the reproducing with keeping the rotation speed of that disc-like information recording medium constant, while changing the rotation speed thereof for each of the said zones, and on the other hand, no change is made on the rotation speed of the disc-like information recording medium when conducting the alternation process.
Also, in the following Patent Document 2 is described a technology of determining on whether the disk rotation speed at the disk radial position of the defect block lies within a range of a reference speed or not, when conducting the alternation process, and upon a result of that determination, the rotation speed of the disk is set up or controlled at least to be within the range of the reference speed, thereby suppressing a difference of the rotation speeds of the disk, i.e., between that within the area for user data and that within the alternation area. In this manner, executing the disk rotation speed control, separately, between in the user data area and in the alternation area, enables to suppress the difference in the disk rotation speed while maintaining a quick response.
[Patent Document 1] Japanese Patent No. 2900389; and
[Patent Document 2] Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2006-12321 (2006).
However, with such the conventional arts as was mentioned above, although the consideration was paid upon the rotation speeds of the disk within the user data recording area and the alternation area, for the purpose of maintaining the quick response of the apparatus, however no mentioning is made about determination of the alternation area in the alternation process mentioned above. Thus, with the conventional arts, the determination is made automatically, but not depending upon the recording position of the origin of alternation (i.e., the position of the disk defect), in particular, even when determining of the alternation area on the disk, which has the alternation areas on both the innermost peripheral position and the outermost peripheral position. For that reason, it takes a long time for the alternation process of necessarily carrying out the movement of the pickup and further the control of the disk rotation speed, accompanying inertia therein, and therefore it cannot say that it is a suitable process for shortening the time of the alternation process.
Also, no consideration was paid upon the position of recording the origin of alternation (i.e., a destination of alternation) when determining the rotation speed of the disk within the alternation area, even on the disk having the alternation area only on the innermost peripheral position thereof.